[ipnon]

We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com. People are out of work, and those with other alternatives or preferences will leave the tech industry. In 10 years entire new platforms and modes will exist that generate even more opportunities than before. Some variation of this wave has been surfed up and down since the invention and industrialization of computation.

[Aurornis]

> We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com

It certainly feels this way if your only perspective on the tech industry comes from headlines and social media.

Step outside of the doomerism whirlwind that is internet headlines and it's a very different story. There are a lot of companies doing great things and delivering products that people use, but they don't make for catchy headlines. So you don't hear about them.

[lubujackson]

I don't think it's doomerism. I started my career during the dotcom boom. I think we are right now in a transition period that is little bit of the start of the boom (just add AI! is the new "just add Internet!") and also a bit of the scorched earth after the initial boom, when all the tourists (CS is easy money!) are rerouted to other careers if at all possible.

This also means it is a great time to start a small, profitable business because labor is undervalued.

[_fizz_buzz_]

At the end of the dotcom boom there were also a lot of companies doing good work.

[red-iron-pine]

ehhhh half of them were "...but for dogs!" and there were a lot of false starts and hype.

[whattheheckheck]

Where do you hear about them

[yndoendo]

One barrier in communication is that developers are not the ones able to post for jobs. I would love to have another coworker in software development. I have no say in hiring. Even a QA with a software development background would be gold.

The automation industry with physical products interaction is where my labor shortage lives.

I will be requesting support this year. Software development is about solutions and all industry pivots have a learning curve.

[bitwize]

Hackernews. Check the monthly "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?" threads. Posting on the latter is how I landed my current job.

[tdeck]

Unfortunately that hasn't been quite so busy lately https://hnhiring.com/trends

[DanielVZ]

At least for me, that chart only displays until september.

[throwaway_1more]

I got some great opportunities from that post but lately, it has been a nothing burger. I have been without a job for nearly a year and have applied to many positions on that thread with just one reply and that fizzled out despite being objectively qualified (a take home assignment, successfully completed within the allotted time of 24 hours).

[PessimalDecimal]

If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to keep pace with the hype. Why is it such a safe assumption that this is just like the invention of the Internet (or, as Sundar Pichai put it, the invention of fire)?

[samplatt]

I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.

Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.

The same will happen (IS happening) with LLM's.

[suraci]

"Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. "

"No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour."

soon we'll see if the old man was wrong and short-sighted, or if what has happened since the internet revolution is just an abnormal period in centuries

[rajman187]

> It was clearly valuable from day 1

I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this

In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” [1] and even though that turned out to be spectacularly wrong it shows the attitude in the early days wasn’t one of absolute certainty.

And certainly the current AI boom is most visibly known for LLMs but there is a lot more happening beyond chatbots.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

[0xDEAFBEAD]

He was correct about Metcalfe's law though. He correctly refuted a bad argument, but making a bad argument for a position doesn't make it false.

[wat10000]

Krugman was very much in the minority in that. There was tremendous hype at that time.

[betaby]

Never heard of him. But I'm more surprised that someone who saw the Internet in 1998 would say that!

[red-iron-pine]

there was a lot of skepticism, and from some heavy hitters.

Sears famously laughing at online orders is a great example. They already had the mail over market owned, and already had the distribution, sourcing, and utterly dominant brand recognition in that space. People used to order homes from Sears!

They just needed the online catalog. But the CEO was a psychopath Randian who thought the internet was a fad and now Amazon runs things.

Same with Toy R Us, and Radioshack, which did a lot of mail order.

[thijson]

Sears HQ walkthrough near Chicago before its demolition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yX9D3h2F_0

Ironic that Sears back in the day got started with mail order.

Seems like bad management is a cancer on a lot of organizations. Their size protects them for a while, but eventually they get outcompeted.

[drivebyhooting]

Why does n choose 2 have a law named after it?

[disgruntledphd2]

Because Bob Metcalfe was a hell of a salesman.

[saalweachter]

Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working.

Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.

[PessimalDecimal]

But this sounds like the TAM here is roughly "SWE compensation" versus the value of moving all business and social interaction onto the Internet.

[AlexCoventry]

It seems to me that I can research and study much faster as a result of using ChatGPT's Deep Research, FWIW.

[kavalg]

It depends. If fed with high quality content (e.g. publications) results are decent and mostly on the positive side of time savings/value. Try to ask it a simple question, such as "pros and cons of these two smartphones" and it will suck up marketing bullshit from the internet and give you a convincing, but useless answer. I was really surprised to find this out, because I've been mostly living in the "scientific research" bubble, where it performs good to excellent and really saves time.

[scarface_74]

Only for information available on the Internet…

[yolovoe]

Which is most information...

[nradov]

That really depends on the domain. In fields like manufacturing, resources extraction, and pharmaceuticals most of the valuable information is locked behind corporate firewalls.

[thaumasiotes]

Even just general knowledge tends not to be on the internet if it was produced before that would have been expected.

[cess11]

Why do you think that? I collect books, mainly published from 1850s to 1980s, and it's not uncommon that they only occur in library listings and sometimes Goodreads when I search for information about their authors and history. This holds for some english language literature as well, but more so for books in other languages.

The Internet is basically a young, small portion of writings in english, as far as I can tell.

[alabastervlog]

I have not found this to be the case, at all. An incredible amount is still locked up in paper, even in 2025.

[scarface_74]

Do you think all of the industry expertise for niche markets is published on the internet for free? Why would any company do that?

[NeverFade]

The internet created vast new opportunities for software engineers to create value. Generative AI is about replacing software engineers in creating that value. These are very different things.

[aorloff]

Software engineers also create value by recognizing opportunity.

[ty6853]

Opportunity: you can buy $1500 in shingles, put them on someone's roof yourself in 4 days, and clear $5000 profit -- somewhere where rents/mortgage are under $1500 a month and a nice restaurant meal for two is under $50.

It's rapidly looking like nerding out while pining for the old days where engineering knowledge and education was valuable is maladaptive. The sunk cost fallacy can be real.

[yolovoe]

You can replace software engineers with anything else here. Most VPs and higher leadership I see at FAANGs (who're arguably the ones recognizing opportunity) come from a PM or other non-software background. As much as I'd like to believe we're special, it doesn't seem like we are any special. We have no protection.

It's best to start hedging and learning other skills. Or focus on making as much money as possible ASAP so you have some financial safety net to fall back to as AI and Trump/Musk and offshoring has increased in recent years. All of us need an escape plan ready.

I don't mean to spread FUD. Just hedge please. I assume I have at most a decade of tech career left in the best case. A couple years in the worst case.

[ty6853]

Except now orders more magnitude of internet connected high knowledge third worlders are not only chomping at the bit for these jobs but qualified for them, and remote work is now largely accepted.

The final phase of this is where Americans start moving to some hut in the Congo to survive off the market wages offered when the supply side of the supply/demand curve blows up.